


Re-gifted

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alone, Apollo 11, F/M, Season 8, keychain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-16 01:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8081629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: From a prompt to deal with Scully's giving of the Apollo 11 keychain to Doggett in "Alone."





	

The hospital parking lot was underground, a sickly grey hive of cement that urged escape at every turn. Mulder pulled the keys from the ignition as Scully peered out the window, visually measuring the space between them and a mauve minivan.

“Will you be able to get out?”

“You might have to grease me up.”  It was a pregnant belly joke, not a sexual one, but the silence Mulder once would have filled with flirtation stung.  

Instead, he dangled the keys from his hand, snapping them in his palm, swinging them out once again.  He was either playing with an imaginary kitten or he was making a point.

Scully waited with her fingers on the door handle – chin dipped, lips pursed, eyeballs forward. The quicker she said it, the sooner she could get to the commissary’s very decent chocolate pudding.

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling the sincerity of it like a tiny electric shock.

“Hm?  What?”  He was faking, and faking the faking, and beneath who knew how many layers of fakery there were.  Had he ever really wanted her?  Had he just fallen into something, the heat and convenience of her lithe and willing body (oh God, would it ever be that again)?  She had treated him as a benevolent donor even as they shared their bodies, their French toast, their two AM thoughts.  She could not expect him to love her and want her even as she carried his child, or _because_ she carried his child, as other men did.  That wasn’t the deal they’d made.  

“Oh, you mean this,” he said, holding up the keys.

There it was - shining, catching the unforgiving lights of the parking lot - security lights – dutiful, indelicate.  The eagle landing on the moon, planting its clutching feet in that stunning and terrific spot, lured by beauty to a place where nothing could sustain it.  

He’d given her the Apollo 11 keychain for her birthday over a pink coconut Snowball.  She had seen how much thought the gift represented, even as he underplayed it, the shy hunch of his shoulders a giveaway as he leaned his face closer to absorb her reaction.  He’d watched her make her birthday wish; she could feel him willing it to come true with the power of his stare.  But whatever magic existed then was quickly snuffed out by the death of a friend.  There was still waxy smoke in her eyes when she was proved selfish and ridiculous that year.

“I don’t understand,” he said.  His voice was soft and lost.  She’d been expecting snide remarks, petty anger.  “I don’t understand why you gave it to him.”

“I didn’t – I don’t know.” She licked her lips, root beer from the fountain soda she’d made him stop for buzzing on the sticky sheen of her makeup.  The truth was she’d seen the item in her desk, and then seen Doggett, and in the chasm between those events, she’d felt something she couldn’t face.  Something she thought could be amended with a quick change of ownership, a handing over of the title.   _This broken thing is now yours. Hope you have better luck._

“I thought it was meaningful,” he said.  “I mean, it was meaningful to me when I gave it to you.”

“It was.  It is.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, nevermind,” he said as he fingered the automatic locks.  He leaned one hand on the console and she covered it with her own, pressed her fingers in the webbed spaces of his.  This is how it used to be all the time.  One of them setting up framework, the other filling in all the holes until there was no empty space left.

“Wait,” she said.  She had not yet experienced the thing her mother had warned of, the hormonally charged outbursts, feelings like fireworks, shot out of bottles and then dampened with drizzle.  But here it was.  Love and fear and sorrow mixed into one colorful display.

His eyes were heavy upon her cheek, blue and green swirling in his pupils, planets tugging at gravity. “I didn’t think it would get back to you.  Or maybe I did, I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s clearer,” he said, on the verge of burying the truth in sarcasm, in do-overs, in the finishing of their errands.

“I was protecting myself,” she blurted.

“Are you telling me this medallion has special powers?  Because if so, things have really changed while I was gone.”

“Things _have_ changed,” she said and saw his face slacken, the blind panic of suspicions suddenly confirmed.  “No.  No. There’s nothing with Doggett, nothing.”

“Nothing like we were, or really nothing?”

“You’ve been different since you’ve been back,” she said, unwilling to chase him into the maze of their past.  “More like before, more like we’re just friends.”

“But the Lamaze stuff and –“

“No, you’ve been great. Supportive,” and then she held his gaze, trusting the strength of her own gravitational pull, “A great friend.”

Mulder looked around the parking lot like he’d lost a cat, was expecting it to turn up between a dusty Volkswagen and a Toyota Corolla with a crushed box of Kleenex in its back window.  “Are you saying you gave it to him because you were mad at me?”

“I gave it to him because I’m trying to live with the way things are now.  I can’t just hold onto things.”

She could hear his saliva bubble as his jaw wiggled and he looked for the words, but she would not wait for their assembly, not put herself through the pitying dance of _I love you but not like that_.  She didn’t realize she was crying until he was standing beside her at the elevator shaft, staring at her, trying to pry her attention from the steady light of the button.

“Scully, I just didn’t know if you wanted me to, or how.  You’re pregnant and –“

“And it’s not sexy.  I know that.”

“That’s not what I was saying.  I didn’t get to be there from the beginning.  I come back and you’re a different person.  With another person attached to you.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said, tasting the thick salt lining the rim of her mouth like a margarita glass.  When the elevator arrived, she stepped in after him and stood in front, stubbornly holding her own plane, staring up at the numbers while the air stung her eyes dry.  

She gasped when he reached forward and pulled the red Stop button, but before she could scold him, remind him this was a hospital, his arms hooked around her shoulders and her hips, and reminded her that she still existed beneath the swell of her belly.  He brushed her hair from her neck and tugged her head to the side, placing his lips against her skin, just over the collarbone, then just below her earlobe.

“I was not disappointed,” he said.  “I just didn’t know you wanted me to.”  She closed her eyes, heart fluttering even as her stomach unfurled its knotted fists. She turned her chin to catch his lips with her own.  He had kissed her since he’d been back, but not like this, not with a prying tongue, a floating hand, a finger, light as a t-shirt, over her nipple.  He began inching her body around to face him.

“No.  I won’t be able to get close.”  So instead he pressed himself against her, the smooth, solid center-line of his body, coltlike and dynamic, galloping from between his hips to the gulch of his Adam’s Apple.  She imagined him pulling the stretchy basket of her maternity pants down and surprised herself when the thought left her tingling rather than scoffing.

His fingertips found her hipbones on both sides and he squeezed them, the pressure subtle but sure - the quiet pride that he once again knew what she wanted and the way she wanted it.

“Later,” he said, and the word gave off the bottled-up heat of a cracked oven door.  She pressed the elevator button, pushed away thoughts of broom closets and empty cots.

“Yes.  But first, be nice and give Doggett back that keychain.”

“It’s a pretty cool keychain,” he said, tone waggling.  His hand dropped into hers and she squeezed it.

“I know.  But it’s just a keychain.”


End file.
